Open Geoportal lands to Europe: use cases and improvements from Geodata@Polimi

TeDOC is part of the University Library System, owns a Great collection of historical and current maps, paper and digital and provides at their distribution to teachers and students, as part of the educational and research activities of the Politecnico di Milano. We were searching for a tool able to find, display and download current and historical cartography and, after a few years of work, we have become the first Europeans to use Open Geoportal (https://github.com/OpenGeoportal ) like our working tool. The component to ingest the data to OGP has evolved considerably, allowing better integration with GeoServer and allow automation of the procedures for adding layer via the importer function with the REST API. In this way, it is not necessary to be an expert operator to load data into the OGP. The procedure of data download has been customized to allow students to download prepackaged packages prepared by the administrators (some complex data need additional documentation to be correctly read, such as legends or lists of codes). One of our needs was to interact with other universities for sharing data, and OGP allows us to do this. For this reason, the Metadata that we have prepared follow the ISO 19139 standard and are in double language, allowing the widest possible dissemination and facilitating the exchange. What we hope is that our experience can become a first European base for the OGP Federation, also a new way to share data between Italian and European Universities

Kantor: Bal Rond per Tintagiles

The two scenic stagings of Kantor's production of The love and death machine, are linked, the first to the producer's abstract patterns of his theatrical début, and the second to the results of the death trilogy (The dead class, Wielopole-Wielopole, Let the artists burst!). Both aspects show how their structure is joined to form a circle, the symbol of time's cyclic motion and of the metamorphic stage event

La pouertà contenta : [Texto impreso] descritta e dedicatta a' ricchi non mai contenti

Sign.: A-Z12Port. calc., representando un soldado del Imperio roman

Kiri Carlo Scapin'ile

Bartoli, Francesco, 1745-1806, itaalia näitlejaScapin, Carlo, 1724-1801, raamatukaupmees Padova

Detection of Obfuscation Techniques in Android Applications

Current signature detection mechanisms can be easily evaded by malware writers by applying obfuscation techniques. Employing morphing code techniques, attackers are able to generate several variants of one malicious sample, making the corresponding signature obsolete. Considering that the signature definition is a laborious process manually performed by security analysts, in this paper we propose a method, exploiting static analysis and Machine Learning classification algorithms, to identify whether a mobile application is modified by means of one or more morphing techniques. We perform experiments on a real-world dataset of Android applications (morphed and original), obtaining encouraging results in the obfuscation technique(s) identification

Executive Functions and Deafness: Results in a Group of Cochlear Implanted Children

Objects: This study aimed to evaluate the Executive Function (EF) domains in a group of profoundly deaf children treated with cochlear implant (CI) in comparison to normal hearing (NH) children. The secondary aim was to evaluate the influence exerted by the age at cochlear implant activation on EFs. Materials and Methods: 32 children were enrolled into two groups: group A of 17 CI users with a mean age of 8.78 years and group B of 15 NH subjects with a mean age of 7.99 years (SD + 2.3). All subjects were tested using the following tests: the subtests for working memory of the neuropsychological evaluation battery for the developmental age (Batteria di valutazione neuropsicologica per l’età evolutive), inhibition and control of the impulsive response—CAF, and the tower of London test. Results: No children with CIs scored within the normal range in the tests administered for the evaluation of EF domains. The same scores were significantly lower when compared with scores obtained by NH children. Children with younger age at CI activation showed better executive performances in planning, working memory (backward digit span), and cognitive flexibility (categorical fluency). Conclusion: The results of this study highlight that cochlear implantation plays a role in improving hearing and consequently influences the development of EFs in deaf children

Assessing vulnerability to psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of microblogging content

In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in the analysis of social media data under different perspectives, since these online platforms have become the preferred tool for generating and sharing content across different users organized into virtual communities, based on their common interests, needs, and perceptions. In the current study, by considering a collection of social textual contents related to COVID-19 gathered on the Twitter microblogging platform in the period between August and December 2020, we aimed at evaluating the possible effects of some critical factors related to the pandemic on the mental well-being of the population. In particular, we aimed at investigating potential lexicon identifiers of vulnerability to psychological distress in digital social interactions with respect to distinct COVID-related scenarios, which could be “at risk” from a psychological discomfort point of view. Such scenarios have been associated with peculiar topics discussed on Twitter. For this purpose, two approaches based on a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” strategy were adopted. In the top-down approach, three potential scenarios were initially selected by medical experts, and associated with topics extracted from the Twitter dataset in a hybrid unsupervised-supervised way. On the other hand, in the bottom-up approach, three topics were extracted in a totally unsupervised way capitalizing on a Twitter dataset filtered according to the presence of keywords related to vulnerability to psychological distress, and associated with at-risk scenarios. The identification of such scenarios with both approaches made it possible to capture and analyze the potential psychological vulnerability in critical situations

Surveilling COVID-19 Emotional Contagion on Twitter by Sentiment Analysis

BACKGROUND: The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic seems to encompass a social media debate, possibly resulting in emotional contagion and the need for novel surveillance approaches. In the current study, we aimed to examine the flow and content of tweets, exploring the role of COVID-19 key events on the popular Twitter platform. METHODS: Using representative freely available data, we performed a focused, social media-based analysis to capture COVID-19 discussions on Twitter, considering sentiment and longitudinal trends between January 19 and March 3, 2020. Different populations of users were considered. Core discussions were explored measuring tweets’ sentiment, by both computing a polarity compound score with 95% Confidence Interval and using a transformer-based model, pretrained on a large corpus of COVID-19-related Tweets. Context-dependent meaning and emotion-specific features were considered. RESULTS: We gathered 3,308,476 tweets written in English. Since the first World Health Organization report (January 21), negative sentiment proportion of tweets gradually increased as expected, with amplifications following key events. Sentiment scores were increasingly negative among most active users. Tweets content and flow revealed an ongoing scenario in which the global emergency seems difficult to be emotionally managed, as shown by sentiment trajectories. CONCLUSIONS: Integrating social media like Twitter as essential surveillance tools in the management of the pandemic and its waves might actually represent a novel preventive approach to hinder emotional contagion, disseminating reliable information and nurturing trust. There is the need to monitor and sustain healthy behaviors as well as community supports also via social media-based preventive interventions